Why Are Things As They Are?

Our Updates go on a hiatus for two weeks as RF Steering Committee members and others hit the road for Pittsburgh (AESA), Ohio, Detroit, and even Vancouver.

The core issue of our time: The real promise of perpetual war and rising inequality met by the potential of a mass class conscious movement for equality and justice.

Smile of the Week:
Student asks his principal, “Where is my teacher?”.
“Citywide layoffs”, replies the principal.
“My text books?” asks the student.
“State austerity plan”, says the principal.
“Student loan?” continues the student.
“Federal budget cuts”, says the principal.
Finally, exasperated, student asks, “But how am I going to get an education?”.
To which the equally exasperated principal replies, “This is your education”.

The Education Agenda is a War Agenda and the War Agenda is an Education Agenda Featurette:

Duncan Flunked Chicago School Closing Project: “This report reveals that eight in 10 Chicago Public Schools (CPS) students displaced by school closings transferred to schools ranking in the bottom half of system schools on standardized tests. However, because most displaced students transferred from one low-performing school to another, the move did not, on average, significantly affect student achievement.” ccsr.uchicago.edu/content/publications.php?pub_id=136

Hey Kids, Photograph that Recruiter: www.photographarecruiter.com/

DFT Praises Extension Of Broad’s Bobb Contract:
www.freep.com/article/20091029/NEWS01/91029012/1318/Bobb-to-extend-stay-at-DPS

Detroit: An Individual and Collective Wrong–Award Winning Counselor Mr Z has to Go: www.detnews.com/article/20091015/SCHOOLS/910150386

NEA Loses NCLB Suit; How Many Hundreds of Thousands of Your Dues $s did NEA Waste?
blogs.edweek.org/edweek/school_law/2009/10/appeals_court_upholds_dismissa.html
“Depending on whom you ask, the No Left Child Behind Act might be described in many ways: bold, ground-breaking, noble, naïve, oppressive, all of the above and more,” Judge Sutton wrote. ” But one thing it is not is ambiguous, at least when it comes to the central tradeoff presented to the states: accepting flexibility to spend significant federal funds in return for (largely) unforgiving responsibility to make progress in using them.” NEA will do anything, like courts and ballots, to avoid educator/student alliances to control work places and communities, as those actions would make NEA as irrelevant as it already is.

NEA Bosses Escalated Their Once-Secret Effort to Boost Their Salaries and Merge With the Worst Union in the USA, the AFT and AFL-CIO, When NEA Prez Dennis Van Roekel Directed Key Committees to Revisit the Issue. This is what one researcher rightfully concluded about what would happen some time ago: www.eric.ed.gov/ERICWebPortal/custom/portlets/recordDetails/detailmini.jsp?_nfpb=true&_&ERICExtSearch_SearchValue_0=ED386428&ERICExtSearch_SearchType_0=no&accno=ED386428

And this is what happened last time NEA tried the merger scheme: clogic.eserver.org/2-1/gibson.html

DPS Lost Millions on Corrupt Land Deals: www.freep.com/article/20091027/NEWS01/91027050/1318/We-way-overpaid-for-land–DPS-says

$30+ Million Detroit Public School Fraud and Growing Every Day:
www.wxyz.com/mostpopular/story/Surprise-Revelation-at-DPS-Realty-Hearing/uVsjL5FTYkOR6M29KJGu8g.cspx

Smashing Protest at Southwestern College, San Diego: www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/10/26/southwestern

Public Universities Gut Student Life, Charge More: “The stimulus isn’t a bridge; it’s a short pier…This fall, flagships still had to cut costs and raise tuition, most by 6.5 percent or more. And virtually all of the nation’s top public universities are likely to push through large increases in coming years.”..“The students are at a point of rebellion, because they’re paying more and getting less,” Flagships are attracting more wealthy and better-prepared students. At U.C.L.A., class size has increased by 20 percent over three years ..Today, UM is largely protected from Michigan’s plummeting economy. Only 7 percent of its budget is provided by the state.
www.nytimes.com/2009/11/01/education/edlife/01public-t.html?ref=education

Obama Demagoguery Featurette:

Obama Claims 675,000 Jobs Saved, But 8 Million Jobs are Lost, Unemployment Tops 15 %
www.nytimes.com/2009/10/04/weekinreview/04norris.html?_r=1&scp=2&sq=floyd&st=cse

Edmunds on the Cash for Clunkers Program: www.edmunds.com/help/about/press/159446/article.html

Endless War Featurette: “In the practical art of war, the best thing of all is to take the enemy’s country whole and intact; to shatter and destroy it is not so good.” Sun Tzu

November 9, 1989, The End of Decades of Soviet Fascism. About nine months after the last “Red” Army troops fled Afghanistan.

Tom Weston’s Background Information on Oil, Iraq, and the USA:
tomweston.net/persianglf.pdf

How it Was the USSR Ran Off from Afghanistan in Their Underwear: “About 99 percent of the battles and skirmishes that we fought in Afghanistan were won by our side,” Marshal Akhromeyev told his superiors in November 1986. “The problem is that the next morning there is the same situation as if there had been no battle. The terrorists are again in the village where they were ­ or we thought they were ­ destroyed a day or so before.”
honor. “How to get out racks one’s brains,” Mr. Gorbachev complained in the spring of 1986, according to Politburo minutes. “We have been fighting there for six years. If we don’t start changing our approach we’ll be there another 20 or 30 years. We have not learned how to wage war there.”  Mr. Gorbachev was also haunted by the image of the last Americans leaving Saigon in panic: “We cannot leave in our underpants … or without any”http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/29/opinion/29sebestyen.html?_r=1&ref=opinion

Top US Diplomat Quits: “But many Afghans, he wrote in his resignation letter, are fighting the United States largely because its troops are there — a growing military presence in villages and valleys where outsiders, including other Afghans, are not welcome and where the corrupt, U.S.-backed national government is rejected “He concluded, he said in his resignation letter, that the war “has violently and savagely pitted the urban, secular, educated and modern of Afghanistan against the rural, religious, illiterate and traditional. It is this latter group that composes and supports the Pashtun insurgency. ”
www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/10/26/AR2009102603394.html?hpid=topnews

Drug Dealer Brother of Karzai Said to be on CIA Payroll (NYTimes)
www.nytimes.com/2009/10/28/world/asia/28intel.html

Bombers Hit Pakistani Nuke Site: www.mcclatchydc.com/336/story/77650.html

Spy vs Spy: Fidel’s sister: www.mcclatchydc.com/homepage/story/77732.html

Whoops, There Goes the Economy Again Featurette:

October 29, 1929, Eighty Years on==The Great Depression. The best analysis of the time is here, free:
www.marxists.org/archive/corey/1934/decline/

UAW Locals Rejecting Ford Sellout: Will the UAW Make the Members Vote Til They Get it Right?
www.freep.com/article/20091030/BUSINESS0102/91030058/1318/

For Halloween–Boo! www.youtube.com/watch?v=0thH3qnHTbI and take this you devil Ghoul you: www.youtube.com/watch?v=6xBuYDq0le8

Thanks to Adam and Gina, Amber, Wayne, Doug, Kerry, Tony, Bertell for the joke, Sandy and Van, Ken and Barb, Doug and Connie, Pat, Suber (happy birthday ssi!), Tania, Jill, Carole, Kathy, Arturo, Vincente, Marty, John P, Bill, Greg, Joe and Joe, the Susans, and Ghouldini himself.

Happy Halloween and good luck to us, every one.

r